An interview with Sharon Blackie

What is your writing about, and how does it relate to your teaching and lecturing work?

At heart, I’d say it’s about the mythic imagination: the ways in which myth and story can inform our lives. The ways in which myths and fairy tales offer us a more enriching set of values to live by. These are the stories which remind us that, tucked up safe in the rambling, roundabout lines between once upon a time and happily ever after, lie all the secrets for a meaningful, sustainable life. They show us what it might be like to inhabit a world in which humans are fully enmeshed. In this world, animals always have something to teach us, trees and plants can save or cure us, and wise old men and women are waiting in the dark woods to help us. That sense of awe, of connection, of belonging to a mysterious world which has many depths and layers to explore, is missing in so much of our lives today. What I’m passionate about, in both my writing and teaching, is capturing the imagination, and conveying that sense of living in a world saturated with enchantment.

 What was the book that made you first want to become an author?

I was a voracious reader as a small child, and a great lover of myths and fairy tales. But there was something about Victoria Walker’s The Winter of Enchantment (which, according to my scribbles on the inside cover of the battered copy I still carry around with me, I read when I was 10) that really captured my imagination. I read it again and again. Somehow, this other world that she invented was infinitely more real and desirable to me than those in the Enid Blyton books, with their rather more ‘twee’ fairylands, that I’d been given when I was younger. I went on from there very rapidly to discover Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, Tolkien, and similar creators of other worlds, but it was Walker’s book that first introduced me to fantasy and mythic fiction. It helped me understand how it was possible to translate a love of myth and folklore into a new work of fiction that could captivate, and it made me want to create my own worlds in which I could help readers not only find pleasure, but depth – and ultimately, ways of reimagining themselves.

Which were the books that you found especially transformative?

Oh goodness – so many. But I can point to two in particular. When I was 16 and studying for ‘A’ level English literature, the first novel we were offered was The Rainbow, by D.H. Lawrence. That shook me to the core, and it’s still one of my favourite books ever. It was the ways in which the characters were so attuned to the rhythms of the earth, and then the inexorable rise of what Lawrence called ‘the Machine’ – of industrialisation. The profoundly sensual imagery took hold of me – Anna and Will dancing in a hayfield, for example – and it’s stayed with me ever since. And then, around the same time, for ‘A’ level French literature, we studied Albert Camus’ L’Étranger. Again, that opened up a whole world of philosophical ideas that occupied me for years. 

When I was older, just heading into my twenties, Virago Modern Classics changed everything for me. They offered so many insights into so many different ways of being a woman. Being published by Virago was a very early, seemingly impossible dream, and it still feels like that to me today, even though they’re publishing my next book.

What got you started as a writer?

Finally having a story to tell. I tried several times in my twenties and thirties to construct a novel (I always and only ever wanted to write novels) but somehow my heart wasn’t in it. I think perhaps that’s because I was living the wrong life at the time. It wasn’t till I was in my late thirties, living in America, working again in a corporate job, and on my second major midlife crisis, that I began to find that necessary story. At that time, I needed to finally, finally break out of the corporate world that I’d reverted to after a messy and expensive divorce, but an impoverished and challenging childhood had made me always fearful and far too hung up on security. One day, shortly after JF Kennedy Jr had died piloting his small airplane, I took it into my head that I needed to learn to fly. It might sound crazy, but it made perfect sense to me at the time – because I was afraid of flying. And I had come to believe that if I didn’t find some way to break out of the anxiety and fear that seemed to be dominating my life, and stare death right in the face, I’d never really learn to fully live. Well, to cut a long story short, it worked. Several months later, I was handed the pink piece of paper which would enable me to apply for my private pilot’s license by a crusty old ex-US Marine, in the heart of the New Mexico desert. It had been a long and profoundly transformative journey, and by the end of it I figured that if I could do that, I could do anything. So I handed in my notice, bought a small rundown croft on the far north-west coast of Scotland, and reimagined my life. Shortly afterwards I fulfilled that childhood dream and wrote my first book – a novel, The Long Delirious Burning Blue, which incorporated some of that flying journey, as well as a healthy dose of folklore and selkie stories.

What other writers inspired your writing?

There are far too many to mention; I’ve loved so many books. But writers I particularly admire, and whose work I especially relate to, would include Janette Turner Hospital, Alice Thomas Ellis, Doris Lessing and D.H. Lawrence.

What book would you most like to have written?

The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje. I don’t know why I find it so perfect, but I do. It’s a bundle of perfect things: the beauty of the language, the fragmentation of the narrative, the memorability of the images … Unusually, I adored the film version, too.

Do you believe in writer’s block?

I don’t think so; I’m never entirely sure what it means. I think there are times when you’re writing the wrong book, or not ready to write the book you’re trying to write, and maybe it’s easier to call that ‘writer’s block’ rather than interrogate the reasons why it’s not happening. That happened to me with my second novel. I’d received a generous yearlong grant from what was then the Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) to write it. But halfway through, I lost my grip on it completely. For a number of reasons – but mostly because I’d simply ceased to believe in it. Now, thirteen years on, I’m getting ready to write that novel – though it’ll turn out to be quite a different animal, in the end. I don’t think of that as writer’s block. It was just the wrong book at that time; now it might just be the right book for this time. I’ve grown into it, and it’s shapeshifted into something that I can believe in and badly want to write.

Do you believe that everyone has a book in them?

I believe that everyone might have a story to tell, but not everyone is a writer – any more than everyone has the right combination of skills and personality attributes to be a particle physicist, or a brilliant pianist, or a ballet dancer. But there are so many different ways to tell a story, not just writing, and I think it’s important that everyone should find the way that’s uniquely theirs.